


reciprocity

by Anonymous



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Fluff, M/M, also matsumoto is so fun to write you guys. so fun, but let me have this!!! i live for friendships and found families!, i have no idea how implausible the idea of these people being friends is, thaniel plans a birthday surprise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 14:29:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11511315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Have you ever tried to surprise a clairvoyant?”“Yes.”“In a way that didn’t leave him unconscious in the tunnels of the London Underground?”A beat. “Oh. Then no.”Or: June 14, 1885.





	reciprocity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SearchingforSerendipity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/gifts).



This is the colour of love: 

 

The rustle of mechanical wings outside as Keita’s birds move in the dark; dim, almost imperceptible flashes of pale green lighting up the blackness. Down the hall, Six stirs lavender in her sleep, a far cry from the orange alarm that would spike the air the first few months after she moved in and bolted awake breathless in the middle of the night; this child made sharp and wary by the workhouse. Next to Thaniel, Keita breathes slow and silver.

 

(Once upon a time, there would’ve been flashes of blue, too: out of the corner of his eye, climbing up table legs, flickering behind walls. There are still days when Thaniel has to remind himself not to look for them when he opens his dresser. There are still days when Thaniel cannot bring himself to open his dresser.) 

 

But despite everything, it’s a good life. It is. It’s-

 

“Ghastly,” Keita murmurs sleepily beside him. “Ghastly things, the lot of them.”

 

It’s been more than a year now - long enough that Thaniel isn’t alarmed any more by these random pronouncements. Darkness blurs everything, and the demarcations between what Keita sees and what he allows himself to say are no different. He’s always more unguarded at night, more loose.

 

“Sorry,” Keita says after a moment (his confusion flickers yellow, before it fades). His sigh ruffles the hair by Thaniel’s ear. “You didn’t say that aloud, did you? You didn’t say it yet.”

 

“Not yet,” Thaniel says, rolling over to face him, letting the hazy roll of his thoughts wash over them both: a memory -  _June 14, 1884 - Thaniel bought some music; there is blue cake, with an icing duck on it_  - and a question:  _what do you want this year?_

 

“Well,” Keita says, his eyes fluttering shut again. “Like I said. Ghastly things, birthdays. Don’t set much store by them, myself.” 

 

“No?” Thaniel asks, and Keita hums in the darkness. “But I feel we ought to do something this time around. After all, last year...”  _Never really happened_ , he thinks.  _There was no cake with an icing duck - and it was an icing swan, by the way; I firmly maintain that. We never celebrated; not in this reality anyway; not in this dimension, not this version of_ _you and I_.

 

“I know,” Keita says, his voice raspy with sleep. “But it doesn’t matter, Thaniel. Don’t fret.”

 

Thaniel doesn’t say anything for a moment; instead, he studies Keita’s face: the sweep of his dark eyelashes, his high cheekbones. It doesn’t alarm or scare him, anymore, the glimpses he sees of Keita’s abilities (or more accurately: the glimpses Keita  _allows_  him to see, now) but it never stops feeling a little strange, a little disconcerting - to intend a thought and have Keita answer it aloud; the possible turned probable turned reality in a heartbeat. 

 

“Tell me,” he says softly. “What you do. What is the difference between clairvoyance and... well. Mind-reading?”  _Can you read my mind now?_

 

Keita’s surprise flares ochre in the dark. “Do you really not know? What I do... I can’t read minds, Thaniel. You have to intend something for me to see it - you need to mean it enough that it could affect the future to render it visible to me. But your  _thoughts_ , your  _feelings_  - I can’t see them at all.”

 

Thaniel is silent, thinking, and for a second anxiety pulses from Keita; a low, thrumming blue.

 

“Does it matter, though?” Keita says to him softly; he reaches out and rests his hand in the curve of Thaniel’s jaw. “What I do. What I see. None of it is set in stone, Thaniel. Nothing about it is inevitable. You can always change your mind.”

 

“Mmm,” says Thaniel, and he slides his hand under Keita’s nightshirt: relishes the startled sound that escapes the other man’s throat. He drums his fingers lightly against Keita’s delicate ribs with the fingers of a pianist, a telegraphist, a lover. He taps out a melody against the cage of Keita’s heart: Grizst’s second movement, their inside joke. He taps out a message:  _I love you_.

 

“I suppose I could,” he says at last. “But you know, I don’t think I will.”     

 

Keita’s laugh is surprised; the only way he knows how. This is the colour of love: his copper peal ringing out in the dark. Thaniel thinks, not for the first time, how apt it is, that happiness for the watchmaker is metallic: the deep bronze of contentment, the molten gold of pleasure, delight chiming bright and clear as highly polished silver. “Well,” he murmurs. “I’m glad to hear it.”

 

* * *

 

“Have you ever tried to surprise a clairvoyant?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“In a way that didn’t leave him unconscious in the tunnels of the London Underground?”

 

A beat. “Oh. Then no.”

 

Thaniel rolls his eyes, even though that gesture is lost on Grace, whose head is bent studiously over the paper she’s writing on. What happened between Keita and Grace the fateful day of the operetta has long become common knowledge between the three of them, but some days forgiveness seems further away than others.

 

“It’s all rather simple, though, Thaniel. Well, in theory, at least,” Grace says, and smiles, almost to herself, a scientist’s wry amusement. “As most things are. You know the basics: if you don’t want Mori to know what’s about to happen, you have to stop yourself thinking it, _intending_ it, for as long as you can.” 

 

“That shouldn’t be much of a problem,” Keita says gloomily. 

 

“What, to not think?” Matsumoto says; again Thaniel rolls his eyes, and again that gesture goes unnoticed. Sometimes he thinks these two are more trouble than they’re worth. “What a luxury! I personally wish I could stop thinking sometimes; it doesn’t do one any good, you know, to be occupied by one’s thoughts too many late nights in a row. Eye bags, and all that. The burden of an intellectual, I suppose.” 

 

Grace keeps writing, but her other hand rises up to touch the skin under her eyes. “ _I_  haven’t any eye bags.”

 

“That’s why I said they were an _intellectual’s_  burden, Carrow.”

 

“Oh, shut up.” 

 

“I only meant,” Thaniel says, “that it shouldn’t be a problem to not think of Keita’s birthday surprise, seeing as I haven’t the faintest idea what it is yet.”

 

“Ah,” Matsumoto says. Stretched out on the chaise lounge in the corner of the room, holding a book of Japanese poetry in one hand, he is a collection of lazy lines and loose limbs and indolent charm. “Well, in that case, Steepleton, I vote for a new wardrobe. It pains me to see a fellow countryman in such drab attire. Perhaps we should take Mori shopping.” 

 

“You don’t get a vote,” Grace says.

 

“Steady on, Carrow. One could see your anti-suffragist sentiments from France.”

 

“I’m not going to take Keita shopping,” Thaniel cuts in, exasperated. “And from now on I’m only going to accept reasonable suggestions, please.”

 

“Then you shouldn’t have come to us,” Grace says, still looking at her paper, but something in her voice is different: an undercurrent of steel. Some days, forgiveness seems further away than others. “We hardly know the man, Thaniel; I doubt any suggestions we’d have to offer would be of any help.” 

 

Thaniel sighs. “I suppose. Although I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to hope for more cooperation from the two of you. After all, you do owe him.”

 

“ _Owe_ him?” Grace says incredulously; finally looking up. Her voice whips out in the room, a line of prickly red. 

 

Thaniel meets her gaze head on. “Yes. The two of you - you and Matsumoto - whatever the two of you have, I know Keita is reponsible for it -”

 

Even before Grace opens her mouth, Thaniel can see the colour her anger will assume - all oranges and reds, like a fierce sunset - but before she can say anything, Matsumoto cuts in smoothly, his soothing words a river of indigo. “I don’t know about that, Steepleton. I rather think we would’ve found our way to each other at some point, eh, Carrow?” His voice softens, dips a dove-gray. “Grace.” 

 

And when Grace smiles at Matsumoto, it’s both strange and lovely. Her expression doesn’t soften - because if there’s one thing Grace Carrow is not, it is soft - instead it seems to brighten, to sharpen almost; like a knife fresh from the whetstone. This is the colour of love: the silvers and golds that crackle between the two of them, like sparks thrown from a bonfire. Thaniel and Grace would never have shared this electric spectrum, this push-and-pull.

 

 _I would not have been the only one made smaller by our marriage, Grace,_  Thaniel thinks, a strange feeling humming in his chest. A little like contentment, a little like wistfulness.  _Everything turned out the way it should have._

 

* * *

 

When Dolly sees him and arches one eyebrow, Thaniel knows the other man means for him to see his surprise. Dolly has spent too many years in the police for his face to betray anything other than what he wants it to.

 

“Steepleton,” he says, as Thaniel falls into step beside him. He doesn’t slow his pace, so Thaniel has to lengthen his strides just enough that it is uncomfortable to keep up. “It’s been a while.” 

 

“Williamson,” Thaniel says, and then: “Dolly.”

 

Dolly’s face doesn’t soften, but his next words are a less belligerent form of olive. “Can I help you?”

 

“Did you get my telegraph?” 

 

“I did,” Dolly says. “I thought it might’ve been a prank.”

 

“Well. It wasn’t.”

 

“Good God, Steepleton,” Dolly says. “Why on earth would you come to me asking for ideas for _Keita Mori’s birthday surprise_? Have you lost your mind?” 

 

When Dolly says that, Thaniel thinks he might have, but the truth is perhaps more embarrassing: he doesn’t really have any friends, does he, and at one point in his life he’d considered Dolly one of them. Perhaps there is some left-over affection for the other man still sleeping in Thaniel’s chest; some remnant of the days when asking him for advice would’ve come naturally; some echo of the friendship they’d forged over the telegraph wires a lifetime ago.

 

Or maybe it’s just that Keita’s birthday is looming on the horizon, just five days away, and Thaniel is running out of time. 

 

“Well,” Thaniel says, and then doesn’t say anything else. 

 

Dolly sighs. “I’m hardly the person for the job now, am I. Happy birthday, Mori! Enjoy your present - the chance to see Scotland Yard from outside, and not from within. A prison cell  _not_  with your name on it. Shall we go for a pint?”

 

“He’s not a criminal,” Thaniel retorts, not for the first time. “What would you have charged him with?”

 

“Obstruction of justice,” Dolly replies, not for the first time. “Withholding of crucial information. Wasting police time.” He checks his watch. “A trait you two share, it seems.”

 

Thaniel throws up his hands. “You’re off duty!”

 

“I’m still a copper when I’m off the clock, Steepleton.Have a little more faith in the dedication of our boys in blue, eh?”

 

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Thaniel says. “Thanks so much.”

 

They pause as they wait to cross the road, and Dolly sighs. “If you want my honest advice? The... the ability that Mori has.” Thaniel isn’t sure just how deep Dolly’s grudging belief in Keita’s clairvoyance runs, but he listens anyway. “I imagine it would be overwhelming sometimes, if what you say is true. To see the things he sees.”

 

“I imagine so,” Thaniel says, and Dolly shrugs.

 

“Then that’s what I would get him. Something to make that burden a little easier. Like that,” he says, nodding at a horse-drawn carriage passing just before them, flashes of gray filling the air, sparking in Thaniel’s vision, as the hooves rattle on the cobblestones. 

 

Thaniel squints. “A horse?”

 

“Do you know why horses wear blinkers, Steepleton? It stops them from running wild because it scares them when they see too much. It helps them, to have something to narrow their vision.”

 

A beat. “You want me to get Keita... blinkers.”

 

A very slight smile pulls at the side of Dolly’s mouth; but he has spent too many years in the police force for his face not to betray anything other than what he wants it to. Thaniel knows Dolly intends exactly for him to see his amusement. “It would make an interesting picture.” 

 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Thaniel says. “There are some benefits to knowing what’s about to happen next.”

 

“Like what?” Dolly starts to say, but Thaniel pushes him into a puddle before he can; Dolly’s surprise - and very faintly, his amusement - flooding the air between them with cream.

 

* * *

 

“Reciprocity,” Annabel says to him, her voice crackly over the phone. “I find that’s the rule to gift-giving.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

He can almost see his sister shrug. “People should repay in kind what others do to them. What did Keita give you for your birthday?”

 

Thaniel tells her: a mechanical bird that could record and sing back to him the piano notes he’d played for it, a lifesaver for the times when inspiration hit too hard in the moment for him to transcribe on paper the melody humming in his brain. 

 

“There you go, then,” Annabel says. “Clockwork. That’s Keita’s specialty. What’s yours? That’s what you should give him.”

 

Thaniel thinks about that. “Thank you, Annabel. Give my love to the boys. Or, no - what do you call them up in Edinburgh? The wee bairns?”

 

“Oh, piss off, Thaniel,” Annabel says, but even through the wires and the miles that separate them, her voice is warm and golden-rich, like honey. This is the colour of love.

 

 

* * *

 

Two days before the birthday, Thaniel realizes that he has neglected to ask the one other person whose insight into Keita is perhaps as useful as his own. He isn’t the only one who knows the watchmaker. He isn’t the only one who loves him.

 

He finds Six sitting in the grass on the garden out back, cross-legged as she busies herself pulling petals off a handful of daisies.

 

“Hello, Six,” he says, and she nods at him, solemnly. He lowers himself on the grass across from her, folding his long legs.

 

“So,” he says, and decides to dispense with the preliminaries: the three of them, here in this house on Filigree Street, have no need for conversational niceties. “You know, Keita’s birthday is in two days.” 

 

“Oh,” she says, her voice clear and almost translucent in the afternoon light, like a prism of glass. Her fingers pause thoughtfully on a daisy stem. “Six didn’t know that.”   

 

“Well, it is,” Thaniel says, and then: “Have you any idea what to get him?” 

 

She shakes her head, and Thaniel says, a little awkwardly - Keita has always been the better of the two of them with this girl - “Well. I’d appreciate it if you did. Have suggestions, I mean. And that if you decided to get him anything, it would be obtained through, ah, legal means.”

 

She blinks at him.

 

“If you didn’t steal anything,” Thaniel says.

 

“Six doesn’t steal things,” she says, and Thaniel arches an eyebrow at her.

 

“Anymore,” she corrects, and Thaniel lifts his other eyebrow at her.

 

“And even when Six did, Six didn’t  _steal_ them,” she says. If Thaniel had another eyebrow to raise, he would, but he contents himself with looking Six straight in the eye. This is always going to be a losing battle though: Six can outstare a cat.

 

“What do you mean, you didn’t steal things?”

 

“Six  _didn’t_  steal things,” she protests. “Not _always_.”

 

Thaniel doesn’t say anything, and finally Six lets out an exasperated sigh, her discontent filling the air with violet. “There was other kids, in the workhouse who wasn’t good,” she says. “So sometimes Six didn’t steal things. Sometimes Six stole things  _back_. Understand?”

 

“Ah,” Thaniel says, and the girl nods, and hands him a daisy.

 

 

* * *

 

That night, Thaniel lies awake thinking, the voices of everyone he’s asked chiming together in his head in a rainbow whirl. 

 

_I imagine it would be overwhelming sometimes, to see the things he sees. Something to make the burden a little easier._

 

_Reciprocity. What’s your specialty? That’s what you should give him back._

 

 _Six stole things_ back _._

 

And finally, Keita’s voice joins the fray, shadowy gray and familiar, an old memory: 

 

 _Thaniel, look at this._ He’d called Thaniel over to his workshop, where Thaniel had stood behind him and peered into the inner workings of a watch, glinting silver and vulnerable somehow, like a heart laid open exposed to the night air.  _Watch,_ Keita had said, and slowly, the gears had started shifting into motion, first one, and then another, and then another, until they were all whirring and ticking together in time, a miniature symphony of colour. 

 

 _That’s always been my favourite part,_ Keita had admitted _. Watching all these separate pieces come together._

 

And just like that, an idea starts to flicker to life.

 

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Keita looks at Thaniel strangely, before brushing a kiss against his cheek and shrugging his coat on. “I’ll be gone all day,” he says. “So I suppose it would be a good time to do whatever you have planned.”

 

Thaniel blinks at him. “Do you know what’s going to happen?”

 

Keita smiles at him, a little puzzled. “No. Only that something is.”

 

“Good,” Thaniel says. “Good.”   

 

 

* * *

 

It’s strange to see them all gathered under one roof: Grace and Matsumoto and Dolly and - and Six, lurking in the shadows, eyes wary as she studies the visitors. Thaniel gives her a stern look, one that says:  _whatever they came into his house with, they’d better leave with, Six_. She sticks her tongue out at him.

 

“Come on then, Thaniel, tell us already,” Grace says impatiently. “Some of us have work to do.”

 

And Thaniel does.  

 

 

* * *

 

_Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead_  is how the adage goes, but Keita is different, has always been different. Thaniel knows, now - and Grace agrees - that to keep a secret from the watchmaker, the more people involved the better. To keep track of six different futures, six different sets of thoughts and plans and intentions, always shifting, intentionally kept as murky as possible, as clouded as they could be - surely that would be complicated enough to keep Keita in the dark, if only for a day. (Grace herself has had firsthand experience evading Keita’s sight - Thaniel knows if anything, he can rely on the pattern of her thoughts to safeguard the element of surprise.)

 

So the surprise is settled, but the question of the actual present is another thing altogether. But Thaniel thinks he’s got it covered.

 

 

* * *

 

The next day, the day of Keita’s birthday, Thaniel goes home that evening to find the door already open, Keita leaning against the doorway. There are already seven cups of green tea steaming on the living room table: one for each of the inhabitants of this house on Filigree Street as well as for the people trudging up the front steps behind Thaniel. Keita arches an eyebrow at Thaniel as he watches the people enter his house, and there is apprehension there - but there is also trust. Thaniel touches his shoulder for a moment - _is this okay? are they okay?_ \- and the watchmaker nods at him.

 

“I prefer brown tea, Mori, not this green muck,” Dolly says, looking at his teacup in dismay, and Keita replies, unruffled, “I know.” 

 

“Right!” Thaniel says. “We all know what we’re here for, so there’s no need to beat around the bush. Happy birthday, Keita,” he says, and something in Keita’s face softens. “This one’s for you.”

 

They all take their positions by the piano: Grace and Matsumoto and Dolly and Six - only Thaniel remains by Keita’s side. The watchmaker’s face is confused, blinking, and then - there’s comprehension, and shock, and delight, and, oh well. Having a surprise spoiled just before it was meant to be revealed - that’s pretty damn good when you’re in love with a clairvoyant.

 

“Requiem for Katsu,” Thaniel announces, and the first clumsy notes on the piano ring to life. “A piece written for 8 hands.”'

 

 

* * *

 

_What is your specialty?_ Thaniel knows - and Keita knows too, had recognized it even before Thaniel had - that it is music. 

 

 _Reciprocity._  There’s a beautiful kind of symmetry in using Keita’s present to Thaniel - that little mechanical bird - to help compose Thaniel’s gift back to him.

 

 _Something to make the burden easier_. Katsu had been the balm to Keita’s loneliness long before Thaniel and Six had arrived in his life, and Thaniel knows, even now, there are days when the octopus’s loss cuts sharp, days when Keita looks around the room before he remembers not to.

 

 _Sometimes, you have to steal things back_. Thaniel had thought there had also been a beautiful kind of symmetry in Grace - the person who had stolen Katsu in the first place - helping in bringing the octopus’s requiem to life. But the more he thought about it, the more this sentiment went even deeper. There had been so many things that Keita had lost to his clairvoyance, but chiefly among them was the easy chance for friendship. The opportunity for relationships untainted by wariness, by the fear that seeing the future meant the ability to manipulate it.  

 

Clairvoyance had stolen those things from Keita. The least Thaniel could do was steal them back. 

 

 _That’s always been my favourite part_ , Keita had told him once, his voice silver-soft.  _Watching all these separate pieces come together._

 

And so this is what Thaniel can do for the watchmaker he loves: bring all the different people in their lives together for him, because of him. 

 

It sounds awful, of course. Thaniel had had just the one day to teach them the song, and four people standing at a piano is always going to be a bit of a squeeze. It’s all discordant notes and jarring colours, fingers stumbling on the piano keys and pedals pressed at the wrong moment, and “Shit, Carrow, you needn’t hit those keys quite so hard”, the air full of clashing shades and mismatching tones, but - 

 

This is the colour of love.

 

 

* * *

 

“Did you like it?” Thaniel asks Keita that night, as he rests his head against the watchmaker’s chest, listening to the ticking of his heart.

 

“Mmm, fishing for compliments, I see,” Keita says, running his fingers through Thaniel’s hair. His voice softens, turns almost invisible in the night. “Thaniel. You know I did.”

 

Thaniel waits patiently, because he might not know the future, but he does know the man beside him, and sure enough Keita adds, “I’m not sure how to feel about everyone, though. Grace and Matsumoto and Dolly. I’m grateful to them, of course, but if you were expecting a... a friendship, I don’t know -”

 

“I know, Keita,” Thaniel says. “I know. It’s not impossible - a friendship between us all, I mean - but I don’t expect it to happen now. I understand. We’ve never been very quick to trust, you and I. But that only makes it better when we do.”

 

“Oh?” 

 

Thaniel snorts. “I didn’t trust you, when we first met. Not for a long time.”

 

“Oh,” Keita says, and the word sounds so different than when he said it a moment ago. Thaniel takes his hand - those slender, clever fingers - and presses a kiss to his knuckles, to his palm, to his wrist, to each fingertip.

 

“You can’t blame me,” he says, and smiles against Keita’s skin. He might not be able to see the future, but he knows, sure and immutable, what will happen next. “You weren’t my Keita then.” 

 

And it happens, just as Thaniel knew it would - the colour of love: Keita’s laugh, chiming silver in the half-light.


End file.
